


To My Youth

by Anonymous



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-15
Updated: 2015-08-15
Packaged: 2018-04-14 22:27:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,644
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4582482
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If you're expecting a dragon hunt to save your relationship, first ensure that you haven't driven them to extinction.</p>
            </blockquote>





	To My Youth

**Author's Note:**

  * For [serenbach](https://archiveofourown.org/users/serenbach/gifts).



It becomes a bad sign when they no longer argue.

They’d managed the first day on the Storm Coast without even that, the mood cheerful, though strained. Anticipation still thrummed under Bull’s skin, itching at his palms and in the middle of his back, where the nearly forgotten weight of his axe now hung.

A dragon sighting. A credible one, the first they’d had in years - small, likely young. Maybe even a baby when they’d fought her mother here so long ago. A possible menace to the local cats and goats, few as there were on the sparsely populated coast, and probably nothing the local guard detachment couldn’t handle, but as soon as the word “dragon” left Cullen’s lips, Cadash had volunteered.

Years have sharpened his eye, trained him to find every nuance and tell in the woman who stood opposite him across the heavy oak table, but he needed none of that training to read her then. The spark was back, burning in the center of her chest, same place it burned in his.

A dragon. Just like back in the old days, when they trudged through the muck and ruin of every backwater and armpit southern Thedas had to offer, killing ‘Vints and demons. When “Inquisition” meant battle and glory, “Inquisitor” warrior. Before he discovered that what lay beyond the blood rush of a good fight was not the madness of the Tal-Vashoth, but the endless paperwork of the Inquisition’s spymaster.

When they still used the bed for something besides sleeping on its opposite sides.

They were saddled and on their way that afternoon, shuffled into a resupply mission headed for the coast. Cadash sang as they rode, tuneless snatches of dwarven drinking songs. The soldiers sang, too, well-meaning boys, but he could see Cadash’s shoulders slump with the first notes of “The Ballad of the Inquisitor”. From then on, she kept to herself.

They argue on the second day, little squalls that never build to a true storm. He scorches the rabbit, she dunks the tent in the river. They haven’t found the dragon, and they can’t agree on a path to follow - Bull thinks the broken trees they can sight from the hill of their camp might be recent, Cadash favors returning to the island home of the first dragon they’d killed here. They sleep under the stars, the tent staked out flat to dry, bedrolls carefully laid out on opposite sides of the fire.

It’s on the third day since reaching the Storm Coast that the silence builds, swirling in the widening space between, whipping like the wind around them as they sail back from Dragon Island.

Nothing. Almost as they’d left it, so long ago, bleak cliffs and dead, twisted trees, bleached bones littering the ground. Cadash wore a face like carved stone, the leather of her gauntlet creaking as she clenched her hand, open and closed. A signal lantern, to a man who’d first known her as an assignment, a storm to watch.

Silent hours stretch into afternoon, and Bull’s theory about the trees proves equally fruitless, the work of the winds rather than an angry young dragon. Birds call. Rain drips. Leather creaks. They don’t speak.

The storm breaks as they make their slow, tired way up another rocky hill. They’re bent under the weight of armor and weapons that Bull doesn’t remember being so heavy, murky after a night of sleeping on ground that could never have been so hard. Cadash sets a booted foot wrong and tumbles ass-over-mail with a cry, clattering noisily down the slope to rest in the sodden grass at the bottom.

She screams.

Heart pounding, his own feet skidding on the pebbles and slippery stone, Bull is halfway down to her before he realizes the scream is frustration, not pain. It’s also profane, a dwarven curse so filthy that Varric had choked on his brandy the night Bull had asked for a translation.

“I don’t know what you two are doing together,” he’d wheezed, as Bull helpfully pounded him on the back and nearly off of the bar stool, “but if she’s saying _that_ when you do it, I don’t want to know.”

Small fists and armored feet pounding at the ground, her head thrown back to the sky, spitting forth a torrent of words too angry to meet up with sense between.

“Fucking- One single-! I just want- Fucking nugshit dragon, I can’t-”

She’s climbing to her feet when he reaches the line of grass and trees that marks the tiny valley between the two hills that tower above them. Not so much a valley as a hole, a break in the rock that catches her voice, echoing it back around them until it’s bigger than the woman at the center of the clearing.

“One dragon! How hard is it to find one caved-in dragon in a forest? All I wanted was to get outside the walls and kill a dragon and wear something besides that damn formal uniform for once, and I can’t even do that, can I?” She paces, armor rattling as if her fury might shake it free. “And now we go back. Everyone sighs in relief and sends some real soldiers to do the job.

“I picked up a ball!” she says, her voice thinning, straining to break like a bowstring gone too tight. She’s scooped up a rock from the ground somewhere along the way and now she’s waving it, jabbing it toward him in punctuation to her words. “I picked up a ball, like a _child_ , and suddenly it’s ‘ _Oh Mistress Cadash, you’re the only one who can save the world_ ,’ which I did, but it didn’t stop! It never stops! Only now it’s not fighting battles, it’s meetings, endless meetings and reports and receptions and sometimes I truly believe I’ll never see the sky again, just the inside of the War Room for the rest of my Stone-cursed _life_! ‘ _Mistress Cadash, there’s a petition from Antiva_ ,’ ‘ _Mistress Cadash, our supplies of tea are running low_ ,’ ‘ _Mistress Cadash, what color should the embroidery be on these commemorative Inquisition smallclothes?_ ’ ‘ _Mistress Cadash!_ ’ ‘ _Mistress Cadash-!’_ ”

She pauses, face red and chest heaving, and only then seems to realize the picture she’s making - strained forward on her toes toward him, a dirty rock clutched tightly in her fist, leaves and little sticks in her hair tangling with every angry shake of her head. As they watch, a tiny black beetle crests the dome of the rock, then starts back down the other side, unaware of the storm above.

Bull knows. Oh, he knows. It’s the knowing of every morning, when he wakes to an empty bed and shuffles on aging, aching feet to his office in the tower, the overstuffed chair that’s molding to his ass as he takes one paper at a time from a tower of intelligence reports, only to see them replaced almost as soon as they’re read. The tavern he can see from his window, now more a fond memory than a home. The way Krem greets him with a pinch to the gut every year, when the Chargers return to Skyhold to winter over, and every year there’s a little more gut to pinch.

Bull knows, but when he breaks the silence, he chooses the words against his better judgement.

“Smallclothes?”

Cadash lets the rock fall, burying her face in her hands with a huff. Almost a laugh, but stilled in the throat, a little bitter to swallow.

“Truly. Apparently they sell them in Orlais.”

“Orlesians. Remember the year everyone wore those horns strapped to their foreheads? You saved the world for that, Boss. Silky underthings.”

She smiles up at him, a small, wan thing but a real one, and in that smile is a younger woman, grinning over a mug of _maraas-lok_ , dragon’s blood under her fingernails. It is a younger man that takes the step forward, resting a heavy hand on her shoulder and leaning down with a leer.

“The question is… are you wearing them?”

* * *

The grass is wet and cold beneath his ass, but sweat is wet, and rain too, and he’s dripping with both. Cadash sighs at his side, warm skin sliding slick against him as she draws looping figures through the growing puddle of both on his chest with a thick finger. An ache in his knee, a bruise on his neck, the nagging dig of a curved tooth trapped between their bodies. Can’t catch his breath, and it’s funny; he knows that’s age but right now it’s making him feel anything but old.

A crashing from above, the sound of claws scrabbling frantically against stone as a dark shape rolls down the rock face with a screech of alarm.

She’s a little short of magnificent. Stout, the size of a large cow, maybe. The young dragon rights herself, untangling short limbs with something far from grace. It’s only then that she notices them, still frozen in their own naked tangle across the grass, hands midway to their discarded weapons.

Bull slowly, deliberately lowers his hand.

Tossing her head, the dragon bleats her defiance and, clearly considering them sufficiently cowed, picks her way back up the hill behind her.

“She’s going to be beautiful in a few years.” Cadash props herself up on her elbows, twisting the chain around her neck to bring it back to rest where it belongs, dangling between her breasts. Bull reaches for the tooth that hangs there, the bone yellowed, worn and shining with age.

“We’ll come back, _kadan_.” He runs his thumb over the weathered inscriptions, smoothed by years of skin and armor and the nervous clutching of a hand, open and closed. She tugs at his own necklace, pulling him down to press her lips to his. A smile curving against him, slow and easy.

“We always do.”


End file.
